Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2128 page)

“Turner is to have five pictures in the Exhibition. Eastlake only one. It is thought members will be behindhand in the number of pictures they send; which, with your absence, will make us not so strong as last year.

Your two letters from Rome, I keep together: they are most interesting; and whatever you may be pleased to send me in the same style, will form a complete history of your journey for future reference. I hope you have examined the Doria pictures. My brother and sister join in kindest regards to Mrs. Collins, and to the young gentlemen. I am, with sincere esteem and regard,

“Most faithfully yours,

“DAVID WILKIE.”

To follow Mr. Collins through all his opinions and employments while at Rome, would be to occupy far more space than the limits of this work can now afford. Further references to the impressions produced on him by Italian Art, are moreover unnecessary here, as other notices of the great pictures he saw will be found in his letters to Sir D. Wilkie that are yet to come. In following him now therefore, in his progress as a tourist, rather than as a painter, it is to be related that having, as the spring advanced, visited Tivoli, Albano, and the other environs of Rome — having sketched the landscape scenery of the Campagna; and having beheld the far-famed ceremonies of the “Holy Week,” he began to make arrangements for passing the rest of the spring and the summer at Naples. The inquiries consequent upon this resolution, produced the unsatisfactory intelligence that the cholera had again declared itself, in one or two cases, at that place. Cautious friends, upon hearing this, advised avoiding all risk, and remaining some time longer at Rome; but Mr. Collins, finding his family ready to submit to the chances of a southward journey; anxious to behold the scenery of the Bay of Naples under the glow of early summer; and perfectly convinced that, if the cholera had really broken out at Naples, it would soon spread to Rome as well; determined on following his first plans; and after a delightful journey of rather more than two days, arrived safely at his place of destination.

Nothing in Naples, at first sight, conveyed the slightest idea that the city was threatened by a wasting pestilence. The gaieties of the place all moved on unchecked, and the idle and good-humoured populace lounged about the streets with the same sublime carelessness of all industrious considerations that had ever characterized them. To one who had been, like Mr. Collins, a painter of maritime landscape and domestic life, such a town as Naples was fertile as “ a promised land “ to the requirements of his Art. The incomparably lovely coast scenery on each side of the bay, glittering under the sunlight of noon, or softening under the lustrous haze of evening, made pictures at all points, ready to his hand. The picturesque fishing-craft and fishermen on the beach, so different from the English and French models that had hitherto employed him, — the great army of vagabonds, male and female, eating, drinking, and sleeping in the streets, from whose dress, figures, and actions Hogarth himself might have drawn new funds of pictorial humour, — and the gaily-attired country-people in the neighbouring villages, with their pretty floral festivities, and their patriarchal agricultural customs, so well fitted for new illustrations of Italian cottage life, — all presented to the painter such a wide field for future study, that he hardly knew where to begin first. Three weeks after his arrival at Naples were quickly consumed in making slight sketches, inspecting works of Art, and visiting all the different sites of beauty or antiquity in the neighbourhood of the city. At the expiration of this period he began to prepare for that more exclusive pictorial study of the people and the place, from which he expected to derive so much enjoyment and improvement in his Art. This plan was no sooner formed, however, than frustrated. Strange-looking yellow sedan chairs, with closed windows, had for some days been observed passing through the street before the painter’s house. On inquiry, it was ascertained that their occupants were sick people, being conveyed to the hospital; and, on further investigation, these sick people were discovered to be cholera patients.

Those to whom Mr. Collins applied for advice under these circumstances, strenuously recommended him to quit Naples before matters grew worse and quarantine was established, unless he was ready to risk being shut up in the most crowded city of Italy, with a fatal pestilence raging in its streets. He took the hint thus given at once, and repaired with his family to Sorrento, a town beyond Castel-a-mare, on the left shore of the Bay. A very short time after his departure the cholera rapidly increased in Naples, the quarantines were drawn round the city, and on one day, when the pestilence was at its height, it was reported that as many as four hundred people died of it in four-and-twenty hours.

The painter could not have chosen a more delightful place of refuge from infected Naples than Sorrento; which presented to him the advantages of some of the most exquisite coast and inland scenery in Italy, of a healthy soil, of civil, orderly inhabitants, and of a pleasant circle of English visitors. To the elabourate oil and water-colour studies made by him in this interesting sojourn, are to be traced many of the best pictures and backgrounds of pictures that he painted on his return to England. Every object in the place adapted itself as delightfully to his Art by its beauty, as it appealed to his curiosity by its antiquarian associations. If he set forth to study the coast, he could descend to the beach from the cliff on which his house stood, through the winding caverns consecrated by Ulysses to the Syrens; and, arrived at the sea, could look one way towards the noble promontory of Massa, the ancient dominion of the Syren Queens, and could see in the other direction the clear outline of the classic Vesuvius, ever crowned, even on fairest days, with its thin volcanic cloud of white smoke. Or, if he desired to sketch the inland scene, he could wander through paths made over the sites of the country groves and villas of the old Romans, and still bounded on each side by orange and lemon gardens, by vineyards and fig-orchards, by cypress, pine, and olive-trees, which led him to the open, upper extremity of the plain of Sorrento, whence he could look down over the fertile scene he had just passed through, and the Bay of Naples shining beyond. Of the sketches he made from such points of view as this, and from the coast, the two largest bear the appearance of finished pictures; although not a single touch was laid on either of them at home. The first is coloured with surpassing brilliancy and vigour. Its foreground is a strip of cornfield, overhung by the branches of a large chesnut-tree; its distance, the olive-gardens of Sorrento, the coast of Vico, the bright Mediterranean, and Vesuvius beyond. As a piece of landscape-painting, it yields to nothing of its class that he ever produced. The second looks towards Vesuvius also, but from a different point. Here the smooth limpid sea, with gay market-boats floating idly on its surface, ripples into the foreground, tinged with the clear Italian reflections of the hour and scene. A strip of beach, an extremity of rocky cliff, and the point of Vico, presented the rest of the composition in Nature, and supply it in the sketch. The airy delicacy and day-light of the effect thus produced proved so popular in England, that the painter was commissioned to paint two pictures from it. The original study, (for which many offers have been made,) remains, as well as the landscape first mentioned, a treasured heirloom in the family of the painter.

When not engaged in studying the landscape of Sorrento, my father found ample occupation in making sketches from its inhabitants. There was an old lay-brother at the convent, who, provided he were well supplied with snuff, was perfectly willing to figure on the artist’s canvas whenever he chose to paint him. Then there were the son and daughter of the tailor, a fine, wild, picturesque pair, who were quite as ready to earn money by sitting for their portraits, as by patching old clothes on their father’s shopboard. A pretty little girl, too, was found spinning in a neighbouring garden, and painted in her attitude while at work; a picture being afterwards made of her from the study thus produced. These, and other models, — among whom a handsome sunburnt fellow who acted as a guide was especially prominent, — were all painted by Mr. Collins in the open air, either on the terrace of his house, or in the garden attached to it, in order that they might lose nothing in his hands of that bright glow of air and daylight which had shone over them when he first beheld them at the doors of their dwellings, or among the plants in their vineyards. It was well for the painter that he was thus constantly able to employ his pencil on the people and scenery of Sorrento; for all communication between that place and the towns in its neighbourhood was soon cut off by the establishment of quarantines, — the cholera having spread, but in a slighter degree, through the country villages, as well as the capital of the kingdom of Naples. An amusing instance of the manner in which the local sanitary regulations were observed occurred at the picturesque fishing-town of Amalfi, which the painter set forth to visit soon after his arrival at Sorrento. As soon as his boat approached the shore, two armed soldiers ran down to the water’s edge, and forbade all projects of landing until the requisite quarantine had been performed in the lazaretto, — which bore the appearance of a ruined dog-kennel on a large scale. A demand for dinner was next proffered, and complied with by the landlord of the inn, who sent his cooks down to the beach in procession with the dishes, which were placed close to the sea, and taken into the boat by the sailors, after the bearers of the feast had retired discreetly, afar from the slightest breath of contagion. Even the money to pay for the repast was ordered to be thrown, with the empty dishes, into shallow water, that they might be purified by the sea, before the wise men of Amalfi touched either the one or the other. During these proceedings, the idle population, who flocked down to the beach, saw themselves, to their utter astonishment, quietly adorning from a distance the sketch-book of the painter; who on this, as on all other occasions, coolly made the most of his time and pencil which existing circumstances would allow.

My father’s unabated enthusiasm in the prosecution of his studies, though leading to the happiest results for his Art, produced at this period of his tour the most unfortunate consequences for himself. Such of his friends at Sorrento as were residents there, constantly entreated him, as they saw him set forth, day after day, on his sketching excursions, not to risk exposure to the noontide heat, but to take the usual “siesta” enjoyed by the Italians during the middle of the day. Remonstrances of this kind were, however, in vain; he met all objections, by declaring that he had not come all the way to Italy to go to sleep in the daylight — that he could not remain within the house, even for an hour, while there was anything left to sketch without — and that he trusted to his temperate habits and good constitution, to enable him to follow his occupations, in his own way, with impunity. For some time he was not deceived in his confidence in his own powers of endurance; but one evening, at the end of July, he was seized, after a long day’s sketching, with shivering, sickness, and pains in the head and limbs. A Scotch physician, who happened fortunately to be staying at Sorrento, was called in, and treated him with the greatest attention; but his symptoms gradually became worse. Violent rheumatic pains attacked his right hand, arm, and shoulder, his left knee and ankle, and even his eyes; and he found himself, at the commencement of the brilliant Italian autumn, confined in a state of helpless suffering to the limits of a sick room.

The mental prostration, produced by this calamitous suspension of all his pleasures and projects, strengthened, as may be imagined, the physical evils of his disorder. Remedy after remedy was tried without effect, and his rheumatic sufferings continued with more or less severity, until the beginning of October, when his medical attendant, as a last resource, ordered his removal to the natural sulphur-baths in the island of Ischia, celebrated for their restorative effect on the complicated disorder under which he still laboured.

He was carried down to the boat that was to convey him, with his family, from Sorrento, a melancholy contrast, in his helpless position, to his former active and industrious self. The servants at the Hotel, the models he had painted from, and others of the kindly, simple inhabitants of Sorrento, whose hearts his gaiety and good nature had completely won, shed many an honest tear of regret, and offered many a sincere prayer for his recovery, as they bade him farewell at the beach, and watched his departing boat, as it steered across the Bay for the shores of Ischia.

CHAPTER II.

1837 and 1838.

Gradual progress towards convalescence at Ischia — Return to Naples — Anecdotes of perseverance in studying Nature through all difficulties — Gradual recovery — Diary at Naples — Letter to Sir David Wilkie — Departure for Rome — Re-commencement of Studies there — Observations on the Painter while at Rome; communicated by Mr. G. Richmond — Letter to Sir David Wilkie, and reply — Plans for a homeward route — Difficulties about transporting sketches to England — Departure for Florence — Occupations in that city — Gradual progress through Bologna, Parma, Verona, and Padua, to Venice — Letter from Venice to Sir David Wilkie — Sketching from Nature on the Canals — Anecdotes of Lord Byron’s cook, “Beppo” — Studies from pictures, and description of first sight of Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion” — Departure from Venice — Inspruck — Saltzburg — Ten days’ stay at Munich — Return to England by the Rhine.